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Which Way for the Alter-Left? Chaia Heller Introduction

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Which Way for the Alter-Left? Chaia Heller Introduction This document is a draft in process. Please do not reproduce, circulate or cite without permission by the author. Which Way for the Alter-Left? Chaia Heller Introduction Everyone in the Occupy Wall Street Movement is talking about revolution and social change. While these words roll off the tongue easily, many find it difficult to define precisely what they mean. It’s not that folks are disinterested. Our lack of understanding about various forms of resistance and mobilization reflect a cultural problem of revolutionary illiteracy: Few in this country know are familiar with the history of the Left. Only a handful in this country understand its various strengths and limitations, and how we are reviving the Leftist tradition right here, today, at this very moment. People around the country are showing that they are deeply committed to creating a movement for social change. They’re coming to the conclusion that they could actually occupy this financial district, this bank, this city park, or this city-square—if they just showed up. By holding public meetings in which everyday people can have a voice, we’re reclaiming not only public space, but also our public political identities as citizens: We’re recovering our own publicity. For years, the media has portrayed activists as saying what they don’t want. This time, we’re saying out, loud and proud: Occupy This! Today, the this we’re talking about is direct democracy, moral economy, social justice, and ecology—to name but a few freedoms we’ve got up our sleeves. We’re ready to occupy our lives. In the Occupy movement, people have seized the militaristic term occupy, infusing it with a peaceful, democratic, and anti-capitalist sensibility. Now, the verb to occupy is a metaphor for taking hold of a kind of power that was ours all along. 1 1 We’re Dorothy, at the end of the flick. But the green-faced witch was wrong; we don’t have to surrender. All we have to do is click the heels of shoes we’ve been wearing all along and we’re home. * We’re occupying Wall Street in New York City, the centers of our towns, as well as cities and villages around the country—and around the world. In doing so, we’re expressing the same crucial sentiment: We are the people who can occupy the public sphere. We can create directly democratic forums that belong to us, the 99%, who, along with the rest of nature, occupy the planet. We can easily tip the balance so that we swing away from the bleak direction in which we’re headed. We all want more than to simply occupy—a word whose meaning points from the mundane to the horrific. Occupy is what renters do after signing a lease. It’s what squatters do when finding a place to hang a coat and lie down. Occupy is also the stuff of military drones and their imperial masters. The Occupy movement is about everyday citizens getting on the train that could lead us to a world in which we govern ourselves directly. We might have been deprived the rich history of what direct democracy has meant. But we know it entails more than begging elected representatives to make decisions on our behalf. 2 2 This document is a draft in process. Please do not reproduce, circulate or cite without permission by the author. Part I: How Did We Get Here? From the Old Left to the New Left—and to the New Social Movements The calls for democracy in the Middle East during 2011 played a role in inspiring U.S. Americans to take to the streets in the so-called ‘free world’. Despite the many differences between movements for democracy around the world, many express a sense of political, social, and economic disenchantment. Such mobilizations tend to voice alienation from national and world systems that create political powerlessness and poverty. Each movement challenges a capitalist system and undemocratic forms of government that reduce citizens to wealthy passive consumers (the 1%) or to a mass of politically powerless, poor, and culturally despised (the 99%). Let’s connect the dots. There is a clear link between the Zapatista uprisings of the mid- 1990s that in turn gave rise to gatherings such as the Peoples’ Global Action and the World Social Forum. These alter-globalization movements were then clearly linked to the anti-WTO protests in Seattle, 1999 which continued in the U.S. and abroad well into the mid 2000s. And so now, we find ourselves in 2011. How did we get here? 1.1 Back to the Future: The Bretton Woods System, past and present To understand how we found ourselves in the current political and economic crisis, we need to go back and rethink post-war capitalism as well as the Old and New Lefts. The economic crisis addressed by the Occupy movement has its roots in post-war neo-liberalism as well as in post-war development schemes that first repaired war-torn Europe and then set its sites This document is a draft in process. Please do not reproduce, circulate or cite without permission by the author. 3 3 on ‘fixing’ the global South. Leaders from powerful nations met in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, during World War Two to discuss how to rebuild a global political economy in a post-war situation. At these meetings, Bretton Woods agents established institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. These bodies were designed to finance the restoration of Europe’s infrastructure and economy at the war’s end. Then, Bretton Woods agents would move to ‘develop’ Southern industry, markets, and resources to be circulated in a global top-down economy. In 1948, the Bretton Woods agents focused mightily on the issue of global trade. That year, they began a series of trade-related discussions or ‘rounds’ to be called the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (renamed the World Trade Organization in1994). With this new trade apparatus in place, trade agreements would no longer be unilateral—meted out between two autonomous countries that would have the right to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to particular trade conditions. Bretton Woods agents put in place the GATT as a supranational body, a group of national delegates empowered by, but acting independently from, other nation States. This supranational body would determine trade policies between many countries. Thus we see the emergence, for the first time in world history, multilateral agreements become central to trade- related decisions. In the multilateral system, individual countries (particularly poor countries) have limited power in decision making. This document is a draft in process. Please do not reproduce, circulate or cite without permission by the author. 4 4 The Bretton Woods System played a key role in ushering in a political and economic culture of neo-liberalism and deregulation. And as most in the Occupy movement know, these problems led to the current economic crisis. To borrow a term from Alduous Huxley (author of the novel, 1984), terms such as ‘deregulation’, ‘free trade’, or ‘neo-liberalism’ are newspeak for a set of authoritarian political and economic policies. Euphemisms such as deregulation make pillaging poor societies appear ‘freeing’, normal, progressive, and inevitable. Via the Bretton Woods System, powerful nations crush laws and policies designed to protect the natural resources, agricultural lands, and national/regional economies of poor countries around the world. These laws and policies had for years allowed the 99% to maintain— at least—degrees of cultural and economic autonomy and vitality. In response to the Bretton Woods System, and to neo-liberalism generally, the tectonic plates undergirding the left—all over the world—have been shifting. Over the last forty years, the left has continued to reinvent itself as people try to make sense out of a changing post-war political economy. 1.2 The old left: Before and after Bretton Woods The Old Left spanned from the end of the 19th century until the 1950s. It witnessed the Russian Revolution of 1917, the U.S. Great Depression of the 1930s, and post-war interventions such as the Bretton Woods System of the mid-to-late 1940s. In addition to weathering the red- scare of the 1950s that all but snuffed out the left in the U.S., the left has been struggling since 1980s to survive in a Reagan-Bush culture of conspicuous consumption and de-regulation. Way back in the Old Left in the 1930s, though, revolution was just around the corner. The question wasn’t if, but when would a communist or socialist revolution finally topple 5 5 capitalism. The Great Depression in the 1930s led many in the U.S. to believe that capitalism was in the throes of its final crisis and would be immanently replaced by socialism. Yet those in the Old Left were shocked when U.S. labor literally sold-out to the State and to corporate America as part of president Roosevelt’s New Deal. Between 1933 and 1936, the State agreed to abide by labor’s modest demands (social security, fair labor standards, support to poor farmers, housing acts, and so on). In exchange, labor agreed to abandon its revolutionary goal to overthrow capitalism—and the State. Drained of its revolutionary vigor, U.S. labor would go on to establish a mainly white working class that would enjoy many of the benefits associated with the U.S. middle class. From the 1940s until the mid-1970s, white working class Americans relished in job security that included pensions, benefits packages, and social security.
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